Impatient readers must think William Gass perverse -- and he will make the most admiring reader impatient at times. How can an essayist take so long to arrive at his point? And why does his point so often turn out to resemble a multiple-target warhead? Why do the 400-odd-pages of his latest collection, "A Temple of Texts," read like 600?

Then again, what other writer could make us glad to see an epic sentence from Henry James diagrammed?

Gass certainly knows his own mind, and he knows ours well enough to believe that we will continually lose sight of the real material of writing: words and the structures they make. He repeatedly thrusts that material into the foreground with puns and paradoxes, whiplash changes in rhythm and a leapfrogging of sound and sense. Anyone who does not enjoy seeing thought rematerialized will not enjoy much of "A Temple of Texts."

To enter the mystery of writing, Gass argues in "The Sentence Seeks Its Form," "we listen to writers who have written well ... because that self through which the sentence passes ... is made not of flesh and bone and their dinky experiences, but of pages absorbed from the masters, because that is what writing comes from: It comes from reading."

Latest entertainment videos

Andy Serkis and Martin Freeman discuss being the only white actors in the large main ensemble cast of 'Black Panther'Associated Press

Julianne Hough Just Kissed Her Blonde Hair GoodbyeInStyle

'On the Come Up' Angie Thomas Unveils the Striking Cover For Her Next BookEntertainment Weekly

Guy Performs Impressive BMX Trick on RampJukin Media

8 Awesome TV Shows That Won't Return Until 2019Wibbitz

'Black Panther' stars' 'kindred' friendshipAssociated Press

Amy Schumer Just Got Married!Wibbitz

Jennifer Aniston And Justin Theroux Are Splitting Up After Two Years Of Marriage And More NewsMarieClaire

The title of this essay collection refers to its contents, subjects that plot a ground plan of Gass' shrine to a personal canon. It makes room for Gertrude Stein and Erasmus, Rainer Maria Rilke and Rabelais, Elias Canetti, Flann O'Brien, William Gaddis and John Hawkes.

Trained as a philosopher and vastly experienced as a writer -- with five fiction and seven nonfiction books to his credit -- Gass has one ear tuned to the history of thought and the other to the harmonics of literature. "I have long suspected certain concepts of causing mental aberrations in those who entertain them," he writes, "('substance,' 'essence,' 'soul,' or 'angel,' 'salvation,' 'spirit,' 'sin,' 'transmigration,' 'grace,' 'phlogiston,' 'zeitgeist' and 'wavicle' come to mind), and it seems to me that superstitions operate on the sly, like poets and musicians, placing in our innocent ears a poisonous distillment, so that we wake to find ourselves a ghost in armor on a battlement -- perhaps on an ill-fated crusade -- or a victim of the stars and a casualty of the flow of macrocosmic fluid into sublunary things in somewhat the way Greek and Latin are presently seeping into my Anglo-Saxon."

Breath-testing sentences such as this, freighted with allusions and shifts in tone and focus, occur throughout the essays in "A Temple of Texts." One may reach the end of this sort of sentence uncertain of Gass' intent but convinced of his power as a preacher of salvation by reading: salvation of value for one's time and attention, that is.

"It is probably embarrassingly clear by now," he writes, "that works of art are my objects of worship, and that some of these objects are idols at best -- rich, wondrous, and made of gold -- yet only idols; while others are secondary saints and demons, whose malicious intent is largely playful; while still others are rather sacred, like hunks of the true cross or biblical texts, and a few are dizzying revelations. ... It is one of Rilke's doctrines ... that works of art are often more real than we are because they embody human consciousness completely fulfilled, and at a higher pitch of excellence than we, in our skinny, overweight, immature, burned-out souls and bodies, do."

But as if to frustrate anyone hoping to pinpoint his position on such a labile topic, Gass writes later, in an essay on Rilke, "A poem is like a ghost seeking substantiality, a soul in search of a body more appealing than the bare bones mere verses rattle."

Within the jungle of Gass' prose, where the boa-constrictor sentences lurk, one also stumbles on short spikes of epiphany and wit. Of the famously bilingual Samuel Beckett, Gass says, "He writes equally well in two languages: Nitty and Gritty." Of his discovery of Stein: "I knew I had found the woman my work would marry." Of the author of "Auto-da-Fé," "A deceased Nobel laureate, Elias Canetti has now achieved such fame as to be unknown all over the world." "One ought not to feel about women as Flaubert did," Gass admonishes, "he could be coarse and brutal -- but he will teach you how to treat a page."

At the core of "A Temple of Texts," though not at its center, sits "Fifty Literary Pillars," an anthology of brief comments that Gass wrote for an exhibition of books he believes influenced him at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught for decades.

Even the most impatient reader will delight in the ricochet of Gass' mind among these "pillars." Someone seeking a plan for self-education should linger here.